Kowboy Kaboom (Request)

Each night, Brian Johansson heard weird things. He would be in his trailer, trying to sleep. And stomping. Stepping around. And then scratching. Brian would hear light taps on his window. The squeaky rubbing of pressure. It would last a few minutes, and then it’d be over. The sounds would stop.

Brian wasn’t too surprised. Everyone knew that the place was “haunted ground”. Skinwalker Ranch had a history to it, and Brian came from a superstitious family.  He knew all the folklore by heart.

He felt the urge to look, but he never did.

Until one night.

One night, he heard music.

He lifted his head, and looked up at the window.

A blue light was coming from the eyes, mouth, and nose of Hard-Nosed Harry. Or his stunt prop, for that matter. The pale, featureless skin of his face was bathed in blue. Blinking on and off. The brim of his hat seemed to be getting smaller and his flannel shirt was bathed in the blue light. Brian moved a bit closer, unsure of what he was seeing. And the light faded. Harry turned, and walked away.

Brian stayed in his bed, and did not get to sleep until 11 pm the next day. During the day, he felt uneasy.  Wearing the shirt of the thing that had kept him up, and the hat that seemed to shrink ever so slightly last night got under his skin.  He was unsure of what he had seen. Maybe it was a dream, or a hallucination brought on by stress from the role. It was his first big break, and he didn’t want to screw it up.  The leading character of Hard-Nosed Harry.

Brian slept undisturbed, and did not hear anything strange.

The following day, he had forgotten about it. But then came the climactic scene, the big special effects heavy scene.

Hard-Nosed Harry gets caught in a shootout. Surrounded in a circle, it’s eight outlaws against one hero. The cowboy’s odds don’t look good, so he already lit a stick of dynamite before his corpse fell to the ground.

Director Wilford Preston watched, as a Harry stunt dummy was slotted in for Brian. Blood bags are slid in, nestled firmly in the endoskeleton. Showtime.

The dummy goes up in a loud, screaming explosion.
And the screaming doesn’t stop.
It crawls. It flails. But mostly it just wails, a sad, bleating song.

“Where the hell did you get that thing from?” Brian asked Wilford.
“An auction,” Preston answered in a dull monotone. “They had them for cheap.”
“Get it to stop.”
Crew members ran into the set. The thing jolted forward, and threw itself onto a cameraman.
It began thrashing. Tearing at the man’s body, as broken jingles played.
“Stop it,” Brian said.
“I can’t,” Wilford said with a blank, distant expression as he watched the fruits of his labor come to fulfillment.